As a small business, you understand how hard it can be to market your brand and spread the word about your products or services. After all, you wear many hats and are responsible for a wide variety of different tasks, so dedicating a large portion of your time to marketing activities might not be high on your list of priorities when clients need to be taken care of and sales need to be made. However, if you don’t put in the effort up front to get new leads, you can end up struggling to fill your funnel.
One question that many small businesses have is whether or not Google Ads are a worthwhile investment. Paid advertising can seem like an unnecessary expenditure, especially if you don’t have a large budget for your marketing expenses. If you’ve ever asked yourself, “Are Google Ads with it?”, then this is the article for you. We’ll help you understand the value of Google Ads for small businesses and how you can take advantage of this tool with the Surefire Local platform.
Are Google Ads Worth It for Your Small Business?
Are Google Ads worth it? The short answer: yes.
Google Ads, formerly called “AdWords”, is a form of pay-per-click (ppc) advertising that can help you connect to your target audience and create connections with the people you want to sell to. These advertisements can be as expensive or as inexpensive as you want, which makes them a great fit for small businesses that need to start marketing but don’t have the budget for more expensive ad platforms like social media ads.
What are Google Ads?
A Google Ad is a PPC ad that will allow you to place your own text or shopping advertisement on a Google search result page above the organic search results. This means that your message appears at the top of the page and is the first thing that a searcher will see. When a searcher enters a specific keyword that you are paying for, your ad will appear and give them the option to click. Only when a customer clicks on your ad do you pay, hence the term “pay-per-click”.
Google Ads takes advantage of the most popular search engine and allows you to target audiences looking for terms related to your business. That makes them incredibly valuable to businesses of all sizes, even small businesses. Without investing in Google Ads, you could be missing out on the chance to get your message in front of your potential audience and showcase to them exactly what your business offers.
12 Reasons Why Google Ads Matter
Now that you understand what a Google Ad is, let’s take a look at some reasons why having a Google Ads strategy is incredibly important to small business owners. These reasons can also give you some tips and ideas on how you can create a Google Ads strategy that works for your business goals and your budget.
1. Control and Flexibility Over Campaigns
Google Ads is one of the most flexible ad platforms available. You can pause or stop your ads whenever you need, or adjust your budget and your keywords during your campaigns. This helps you make the best decisions for your brand without being trapped in a campaign that isn’t giving you results.
2. Stand Out from the Competition
With the help of Google Ads, you can stand out from your competition and create a name for your brand that users will recognize. You can target specific keywords and focus your bidding on those terms in order to outrank your competitors and push their ads down in the rankings, which directs their traffic to you.
3. Potential for Scaling Big
Google Ads can start small and grow bigger as your business grows bigger. That gives you unlimited potential for scaling up your brand and boosting your traffic as you need. Just add more keywords to your Google Ads campaigns or increase your budget when you can to get higher bids and scale as much as you need.
4. Target Your Most Engaged Leads
When a user is searching for a specific term, you know they are actively engaged in that search and are looking for information specific to that topic. This allows you to target leads who are most interested in clicking on your ads, unlike social media ads that just appear in a scrolling feed at any time.
5. Faster Results than SEO
SEO, or search engine optimization, is the process of getting your content and links to rank high in organic results, which appear right under the paid results. SEO is incredibly important to your brand, but it can take months or even years to see the results. Google Ads provides immediate leads for your marketing campaigns and sales funnels.
6. Detailed Tracking and Analytics
Google Ads provides you with incredibly detailed analytics of your ad performance and is built right into the same platform. You can learn about your clicks, your engagement, your ad positions, your conversion rates, and much more. You can also perform testing within the tool and improve your ad performance based on real-time data.
7. Compete with Bigger Brands
Google Ads isn’t just about who has the highest budget. The message and content you put in your ads also play a role in how they rank. This allows you to compete directly with competitors who have bigger budgets and have your advertisements appear above theirs when you tailor your messaging and relevance to the search term.
8. Choose Your Format
Unlike other ad platforms, Google Ads gives you a wide range of different ad formats to choose from, so you can select what works best for your brand.
9. Get Control of Your Budget
Google Ads gives you control of your budget and your spending. You can set clear parameters for how much you want to spend on each click so that you never go over budget. This helps you control your marketing spend and keep a close eye on how your budget is functioning, what ads are working, and where you should invest more money.
10. Establish Your Industry Niche
Every business has a niche that makes them slightly different from competitors. Taking advantage of your niche and picking your keywords to reflect your specialty can help reduce the competition and cost of keywords and help customers find you easier. This can also go a long way in ensuring that your brand is recognized for your specialty.
11. Narrow Down Your Location
In addition to narrowing down your industry niche, you can also use Google Ads to establish your location. You can use location-specific keywords to help target audiences based on geography and find more users who are in your local area. This helps you get more customers who are in your area and avoid spending money getting clicks from people who are far away from your small business.
12. Create Your Marketing Flow
Google Ads allows you to send your leads to specific landing pages and place them in a specific spot of your marketing journey. This allows you to carefully track the incoming leads and monitor their progress through your sales funnel. You can optimize your landing pages to convert leads and help guide your customers along the path toward a purchase decision.
Schedule a Demo of Our Business Intelligence Marketing Software
At Surefire Local, we understand the plight that small businesses face when it comes to marketing their services to the right audience without blowing through their budget. That’s why our software is an all-in-one marketing solution that gives you total control over all your marketing channels in a single place. With the help of Surefire Local, you can track your Google Ads, manage your Google Business Profile, gather reviews, run marketing campaigns, and much more all in a single platform.
To learn more about Surefire Local and how we can help your small business optimize your Google Ads strategy, schedule a demo of our business intelligence marketing software. We’ll walk you through the different solutions our platform provides and help you understand the value you can receive from using an all-in-one marketing solution to manage all of your small business marketing needs.